No Flinching

When I was a kid, we’d sometimes play a game that involved fake punching or hitting, getting as close as possible without actually making contact.  The goal was to make the other person flinch, or, if you were the other kid, to not flinch.

With experience, just about anyone could learn not to flinch.

When a client hires a photographer for an important job, I think one of the main things they want and are paying for is no filching.  Given enough time, resources and discussion, many photographers might be able to get the job done.  But given the constraints of time and changing conditions and things not going according to plan, they need someone who gets it done anyway, like there was never any problem.

You have to be like the kid who, having a fist coming at his head, remains as cool as a cucumber, because he knows from experience and practice it’ll be okay.

But maybe it won’t be okay, right? Photoshoots are complicated and here are ALWAYS problems.  Well, there’s always something to be salvaged and redone if that’s the case, too.  Not flinching means digging for what will work and going with that with all the energy and creativity as if everything was okay. 

We all know sometimes we have to just make it work.  And the first step in that is, don’t flinch.

The Distillery

I think the process of creating photos is a lot like the process of creating distilled liquor.  Not that photography necessarily needs an analogy, but sometimes when I’m deep into the minutia, it helps me get some perspective.

Behind every bottle of, say, rum sitting there on a store shelf is a long, long road with many steps.  Land is cleared for sugar cane.  Time and care is taken to then grow the cane.  Backbreaking labor (for very low wages) harvests the cane, to have the juice squeezed out, which is then heated and the alcohol captured, bottled, transported and sold. 

I’m sure I missed some steps and oversimplified, but the point is, that that bottle on the shelf exhibits only a very small portion of all the physical and mental elements that went into its making.

And the photography process has a lot of these same elements.   It has the labor of moving gear around.  It has the mental effort of thinking about it all, and the physical elements of all the gear itself.  And most analogously, it produces many photos that must be distilled down to a concentrated, select few.

When the end consumer sees that bottle on the shelf or that photo in an ad, they mostly have no idea about all this, and don’t particularly care to.   They might be interested in the overall brand story (no GMO, no Photoshop, etc), but that’s an independent factor being brought into the mix for other reasons.

They care about the final product, and how much they like it, not the details of how it got to be what it is.  You have to care though, because it’s your care that they’re tasting. 

So although it may get tiring, and at times seem futile, to be endlessly debating things like whether to go with image A or image B, that’s part of the process.  It all is.  Producing great photos requires planting and growing and harvesting and then, finally, distillation down to the essence.   The quality of the final, distilled product depends on the quality of the work that went on all along the way.